News and opinion from the international medical movement to abolish nuclear weapons and to prevent war

Slaves of fear

On the 14th of June 1946, when Bernard Baruch presented his famous plan to the United Nations Energy Commission, nuclear abolition was within reach. “If we fail”, the report said, “then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear”. They obviously failed, they even keep failing today. If the plan had contained less egoism, it may have had a chance. The nuclear industry would have been controlled before having spread and surely, history would have run another path.
But as all arguments remain the same today, we can state that the intellectual level never changed. Nuclear warheads are still treated like sandbox toys and elected leaders behave like children. Whole populations keep living under the announced slavery, just struggling to look away. Various techniques of looking away even became quite comfortable in the recent years. Whole industries were raised to conduct and guide “ordinary” people through their “ordinary” worlds.
Everything’s gonna be alright, one day. Somebody will take care of it. In this struggle, the entire concept of “civil society” and how we are living and working, our basic democratic values are put to the proof. To reinvent a sane society, we as doctors have to speak up loudly. We will not be silent. That was not news. It only has to be repeated from time to time, not to lose the moral basis, from which we know it is infinitely true.

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Welcome to the IPPNW peace and health blog

A community of international physicians, medical students, and policy experts writing about the medical consequences of nuclear war, the abolition of nuclear weapons, the human dimensions of armed violence, and global issues of peace, health, and security. Opinions expressed by individual writers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the organizational positions of IPPNW.

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